It combines clickstream data -- or data from customers who opt-in to sharing anonymous data as they surf the internet -- with sophisticated pattern-matching analytics, along with data that travelers voluntarily provide to the more than 90 major travel brands that Adara has as clients, including Accor Hotels, Marriott, HomeAway, and Virgin America.

To be more nuanced than that, the clickstream data is only a component, and it's not entirely pattern matching, either. A lot of the data is from "direct and known activities", such as when an anonymous user sees an ad, clicks on it, and Adara tracks whether the user eventually searched or booked a trip to that destination.

The Mountain View, Calif.-based startup collects the data to predict the travel purchase patterns, individual preferences, and shopping behavior patterns of users, with a goal of enabling advertisers to personalize their offerings and target specific audiences.

This complicated concept comes more to life with an example. At last, Adara has shared one.

Adara says it recently helped Idaho Tourism discover that its high-value visitors are ideally targeted via digital marketing 5-6 weeks before travel. Officials may now experiment with boosting its advertising and marketing 5-6 weeks out from key travel windows or promotional periods.

It says that one of its solutions helped Idaho officials grasp that, of its top four media partners, "two of them generated less than 58% of total impressions, but nearly 86% of hotel bookings; another media partner generated the most unique users, but drove the fewest bookings."

It did this by analyzing more than two million Idaho air and hotel searches and bookings over a year.

The data crunching was said to help Idaho get a more effective return-on-investment (ROI) for its marketing dollars by better timing its digital advertising campaigns.

It is still too early for officials to put a figure on the ROI or understand revenue outcomes that coincided with the campaigns. But Josh Mercado, a member of Idaho Tourism, said:

“This tool lets us see inside our campaigns to identify areas of exceptional performance as well as weaknesses and inefficiencies.”

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For instance, Idaho officials can now evaluate their marketing spend with a media partner that -- while it reached the most unique users (more than 1.5 million) and generated the most impressions (more than 2.6 million), drove the fewest bookings and least amount of estimated revenue.

The board says the tool helped it develop a more thorough, data-based look at the Idaho visitor profile and key feeder markets that provide customers who tend to book above-median hotel average daily rates (ADRs.) Hint: the most valuable profile was Midwesterners -- not ordinarily known for being bigger spenders than coastal Americans.

Adara says:

"Travelers who were exposed to the Idaho Tourism campaigns in spring and summer 2015 had a nearly 15% higher ADR than those who were not exposed to the campaign, $155 ADR vs. $135 ADR."